The Story of Owen (19 page)

“Don't you know some things already?” Owen asked. If the question caught him off guard, he didn't show it.

“Of course,” she said. “But if we start at the beginning, we won't leave anything out.”

Owen considered it for a moment, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. I shrugged. It wasn't like I had a better idea.

“Okay,” he said. “Hatching grounds have to be really specific. The right temperature and all that.”

“And there has to be carbon,” I said.

“Not necessarily,” Emily said. “I mean, they're attracted to carbon, but they don't need it to live.”

“So a food source, then,” I said. “Do dragons eat fish?”

“No,” Owen said. “Well, not really. They tend to eat everything. That's why the bear population in Sudbury has declined so dramatically since the number of dragon attacks increased. There aren't enough moose or cows for the dragons to eat, so they're branching out.”

“A dragon eating a bear?” Emily said. “Why are there no Internet videos of that?”

“Presumably because anyone who gets close enough to get it on video gets eaten for dessert,” I suggested. “Bears can't possibly taste that great if you eat them hide and all. Human probably makes a nice palette cleanser.”

Emily looked a little peaky at that. I pressed the clutch and dropped the car out of gear as we passed the “Welcome to Saltrock, Prettiest Town in Canada” sign and the speed limit changed to 50 kph. I hit Owen in the face as I shifted, gently of course, but he still grimaced.

“Where are your aunts, anyway?” Emily asked.

“Toronto, I think,” Owen said.

“You think?” I asked. I really didn't want to get caught skipping school and hanging out with Archie Carmichael by Lottie Thorskard if I could possible help it.

“It's not like looking for a hatching ground is something you can schedule,” Owen pointed out. “They track down leads and then they come home.”

“There were three more sightings up around Southampton yesterday,” Emily said. “Maybe they went up there to help your dad.”

“It's possible,” Owen said. “But I don't think they'd do that without calling.”

We pulled onto the Hub and began the slow drive around the circle. There weren't a lot of cars around; almost no one did their Christmas shopping in Saltrock anymore—or if they did, they did it at the very last minute. There was snow on all the trees, and covering the bare ground, so the shops and the courthouse looked a lot prettier than they usually did. There were Christmas lights strung everywhere, though under the afternoon sky, they just looked like small teeth emerging from under the eaves and biting the edges of the trees. The outdoor skating rink had finally frozen, and a couple of toddlers were stumbling around on tiny hockey skates while their mother huddled behind the boards, clutching her coffee like it was all that stood between her and hypothermia.

“I've never understood that,” Owen said, looking at them through the window with a vaguely wistful expression on his face. “I mean, I had a toy sword when I was little, but so did everyone else. Does skating before you can talk get you into
the NHL someday?”

“They're probably just seeing if the kids can survive the cold,” I said.

“I doubt they're cold,” Emily pointed out. “They're both wearing more material than I am, and even their helmets are insulated.”

We were so busy staring at the future hockey stars that I drove right past the turn to the Carmichaels' bookstore and had to go around again. This was not uncommon, but it always made me feel ridiculously like a tourist. On my second pass, I made the turn, and fortunately there was a spot close to the shop. It still wasn't super cold out, but it was cold enough that I didn't want to be outside for too long. Owen was still generally not prepared for the cold. Hamilton wasn't that far away, geographically, but it was well out of the snow belt and often less cold than Trondheim was. Furthermore, the Thorskard house was always very warm because the cold made Lottie's injuries worse. I hoped it was better when she was moving around on it. Hannah did as much as she could to make Lottie's life easier, but there was only so much help Lottie would take.

Since the rate of dragon attacks increased, Hannah and Lottie had become even more of a team than ever. Hannah was a capable swordswoman, which was quite natural since she'd grown up in a house full of swords and had spent the better part of her life making them for Lottie, but now she practiced a lot more in the ring. At first, it had been part of Owen's training, but as the attacks grew in number and severity, it became apparent that Lottie's retirement wasn't as ironclad as she had thought. She still couldn't move quickly enough to work by herself, but with Hannah's help, they had managed to bring down
four more dragons when Aodhan was out of contact and Owen was stuck in algebra. (The accumulation of snow in the windows of the old stone part of Trondheim Secondary made cell phone reception even more sporadic than in the rest of town.)

It's counterintuitive, really, because you'd think that dragons, being coldblooded and otherwise reptilian, would hibernate or migrate or have the decency to die off in the winter. But we're not that lucky. For whatever reason, dragons are immune to the cold, and some species actually seem to prefer it. Immunity or not, the cold makes dragons waspish and easily annoyed. Or maybe they just want to warm up, and the carbon from furnace emissions does that for them. There is entirely too much pseudoscience when it comes to dragonlore, which is why it took literal fire from on high to get Lottie to pay attention to Archie Carmichael in the first place.

I parked and turned off the car. I pulled my heavy mittens on over my fingerless gloves. I couldn't drive with the mittens on, and in cold temperatures I wore the fingerless gloves almost all the time anyway, because they kept my fingers warm enough to play piano properly. Owen finally leaned back and passed Emily her backpack. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked it for messages out of habit. It sometimes seemed like Owen only ever got to talk to his dad on voicemail.

“Well,” I said, “here we are.”

Emily grinned and opened her door. I got out a bit more slowly, and Owen was even less enthusiastic. I could tell he was having second, perhaps even third or fourth, thoughts about this.

The sign above the door just said “Carmichael's” in a flowery black script on a white background. There was no
indication of what Emily's dad actually did. I guess I had expected something in wrought iron, maybe words bracketed by the artistic representation of a dragon. Or even no sign at all, but a vacant-looking shop front you could only access with a secret knock and a series of passwords.

It's possible that I had given this entirely too much thought.

Under the sign, the whole front of the store was mostly glass. There were two large windows on either side of the door, both festooned with hand-painted Christmas decorations. If Emily had done them, my opinion of her was suddenly even higher: Painting letters backwards is no mean feat. In addition to the window trimmings, there were also two large Christmas trees, one on each side of the door. Both of them were covered in gold and red balls and had stars on top. It was easily the most decorated shop on the street (except for the bakery, which obviously had an amazing window display), but it was still entirely tasteful. It was certainly better than the unfortunate Santa hats from our Christmas concert.

We were the only people on the street. It was so quiet that I could hear the kids on the ice rink laughing at one another. The streets weren't deserted because of dragon attacks but simply because it was the middle of the day in a small town. It was a sad fact of life, but shopping was safer (and cheaper) in cities. The local economy suffered, but there wasn't a lot businesses could do. Or at least there hadn't been, until the Thorskards moved to town. Already my father had told me that the local economy was up, as people stopped going to the covered parking garages in London or Stratford and started shopping close to home. It was another unexpected benefit of having a dragon slayer on speed dial who would actually arrive in a speedy manner.
“Ladies first,” said Owen, hovering on the curb.

“This was your idea!” Emily pointed out.

“It's your dad's bookstore,” Owen protested.

“Oh, you're both impossible,” I said, rolling my eyes. I pushed past them and walked through the door.

There was a bell above the door. I wasn't at all surprised by that, but I was a little startled by the fact that the bell was connected to a series of other bells, strung out across the ceiling like a row of sentries, all ringing at pitches just different enough to put my teeth on edge.

“Really?” I said over my shoulder to Emily, who was still beaming.

“I'm sure the people in the apartment above are thrilled,” Owen said.

“There is no apartment above,” Emily said. “It's the old Masonic Lodge, so it's just a meeting room and Dad's office. He hangs out there, and this way he hears everyone who comes in. He'll be down in a minute, unless he's into something,” she said. “Or we could go up?”

“Maybe next time,” said Owen, and I could tell that I probably shouldn't push him any further out of his comfort zone than he already was.

I looked around the store. On the inside, it was exactly what I had expected: hardwood floors covered haphazardly by a collection of incredibly uncoordinated rugs; shelving units, all so close to one another that the aisles were only wide enough for one person to walk down at a time. I looked more closely and thought that the shelves were unusually big. If Mr. Carmichael had had smaller shelves, he might have been able to fit more of them in. I looked on the floor, where the rugs stopped, and saw tracks on the boards where heavy wheels could pass.

“Oh!” I said, not having meant to speak out loud.

“Neat, eh?” Emily said, having followed my train of thought. She reached up to the shelf in front of us, braced herself, and pushed. It slid toward the back of the store, revealing another equally crowded shelf behind it. “This way dad can have way more stock.”

The back of the store was dominated by a large old-fashioned electric stove, a hideously orange shag rug, a low coffee table, and several overstuffed armchairs. Off to the side were the counter and till.

The counter and the coffee table were both buried in papers. Newspaper clippings about dragon attacks in the area, Internet articles about the geography and geomorphology of the areas Aodhan patrolled, and maps. The maps drew my attention. I wanted to see the story in pictures before I read it in words.

At the bottom of the pile, right on top of the old-fashioned blotter, was a large map of Canada, filled in around the corners by the states that shared lakefront property. Archie, or someone, had marked it up with sticky notes and a red Sharpie. It wasn't difficult to determine the pattern. Michigan was covered in
notes, areas marked off as known locations for egg depositories and the few carefully guarded enclaves where dragon corpses were disposed of after they were slayed. No one actually stayed in those enclaves longer than was necessary to drop off a body, but the machinery used to lift the dragons off the tankers and the piers themselves had to be maintained—and occasionally defended as well.

There was a red circle around Saltrock and a question mark on the school board office, along with a matching circle around the mine. Other places were marked as well. Tobermory and Wiarton were close to old border crossings to Michigan and had RCMD outposts. Similarly, Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay fell under federal protection because they were ports, while Sudbury's nickel mines were wealthy enough to afford the best in corporate dragon slaying. Leamington stuck out into Lake Erie and was generally considered too warm to support dragon eggs, which were laid in the fall for a reason, but it had been marked anyway. Rounding out Ontario were, of course, Barrie, Penetanguishene, and Peterborough, the southernmost edges of our two hatching grounds. I looked for a pattern.

I couldn't see what Archie was looking for. I could only see what he had found. There were more dragons in places where there had always been large numbers, and there were more dragons in places where attacks had always been comparatively light. I knew that Hannah and Lottie had been spending a lot of time looking into areas with small lakes, like Muskoka or the Kawarthas, but so far they hadn't found anything that would explain the increase. It wasn't like dragons could hide where they were laying their eggs. They had to be somewhere. Something had to have changed.

“It has to be lakeshore, right?” Emily said. “Erosion or global warming or something. Something that would make the dragons shift away from small lakes.”

She was holding one of the geological articles and standing on her tiptoes to look over my shoulder at the map. Owen was sitting in the desk chair, spinning around and holding onto the most recent edition of the Saltrock newspaper that told the story, yet again, of the dragon he slayed on the side of the road. There was a picture of him, sword aloft, with me hammering on the hubcap in the background.

“What do little lakes have that big lakes don't?” I asked. “I mean, Barrie and Orillia are less than an hour apart. And it's only a bit farther around Georgian Bay to Collingwood or Penetanguishene. Why does Orillia get eggs and they don't?”

“Current?” Emily said. “Water temperature? Moisture levels in the air?”

“But the eggs aren't actually in the water,” Owen pointed out. “They're in or on the ground
near
the water.”

I squinted at the map, staring north of Orillia to Huntsville, the most concentrated area of the hatching ground.

“Bays,” I said.

“What?” said Owen. He sat up and stopped spinning. Emily gave up trying to be polite and elbowed me over so that she could see the map too.